When I right-click in the sidebar bookmarks, and then click "Sort By Name" nothing happens. No matter how long I wait. It does not matter if I am at the top level or in subfolders. I have to manually sort in order to alphabetize.

My bookmarks file in HTML form is over 8 MB. I did not have this problem in Firefox 2.

Here is another bookmarks problem: It takes around 10 seconds to create a new folder. Since I add a lot of bookmarks, this is a serious problem. Slow bookmarks was the main reason I switched from MS Internet Explorer to Firefox to begin with.

I have gone back to Firefox 2. I will probably try out other browsers too, such as Opera.

When I right-click in the sidebar bookmarks, and then click "Sort By Name" nothing happens.

Click to highlight and open the folder named Bookmarks Menu, then right-click that folder and select Sort by Name. That should sort the folders by name, followed by the individual bookmarks sorted by name. If you want to do sorting within all the individual folders you will need to repeat those steps for each folder that you want sorted.

Ed

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Mine has wandered off and I'm out looking for it.

Neither does mine, I'm afraid. The only way I can sort is to manually drag and drop the bookmark. Right clicking and choosing 'Sort by name' has no effect. The bookmark even remains open when I would expect it to close itself.

I was hoping this would be solved by now. I hope the support for Firefox 2 will be continued for many months. It is what I am using now.

Has this problem been solved? I haven't tried Firefox 3 in awhile to see for myself. The reason I changed to Firefox 2 to begin with was because MS Internet Explorer had serious bookmark problems after upgrading to a new version. This led me to the Firefox browser which I greatly love. I love its spell checker for example. And some of the extensions.

But if support for Firefox 2 is going to disappear soon, then I will have to look for another browser. Are there other browsers out there that can handle thousands of bookmarks fast? Opera? Google Chrome? What?

I am really, really hoping for a fix for this too before Firefox 2 is EOL. I tried migrating to Firefox 3 a month or two ago and the entire bookmarking system was unbearably slow. I stuck it out for a week, trying to get used it and searching for workarounds but nothing improved the new FF3 Bookmark system. Everytime I went to Bookmark a new site, there was a 10-20+ second delay. That's lost minutes every day and could add up to lost hours over weeks and months.

Yes, I do bookmark a lot and I do have a few thousand bookmarks. I use them to keep track of every subject of interest and I really do make use and go back to visit hundreds of sites for technical and educational reference on various topics.

The Firefox 2 bookmark system is essentially instantaneous, it takes a small fraction of a second to add a new Bookmark. I would estimate Firefox 3 to be at least 100x slower for bookmark operations.

I do know about the change from html flat files to the new sqlite system and I tried all the tweaks and optimizations found in this forum and elsewhere, but there was no appreciable speedup in bookmarking.

I really hope the developers can restore the Firefox 2 level of performance in bookmarking or add an option to use the old flat file HTML bookmark system in Firefox 3.

This is a basic, browsing function and if that main utility of simple browsing is lost when users are forced to upgrade to Firefox 3, I will have to move to another primary browser, even though Firefox 2 is my favorite by far.

I hope you will please look into these issues and resolve them or perhaps offer an addon to use the old Firefox 2 bookmark system.

Until, then I am dreading the moment when Firefox 2 stops being updated with security patches. I understand the need to move forward with the new version, which is why I recently tried to move to Firefox 3. I spent hours and days trying to deal with this issue and trying to see if I could live with it, but Firefox 3 was just unsuitable for any type of regular use with this glaring performance problem. I hope this will be resolved or some other accommodation will be made to prevent Firefox 2 users from being left out in the cold.

Biriss Posted this comment on: December 2nd, 2008, 11:10 pm:"Everytime I went to Bookmark a new site, there was a 10-20+ second delay. That's lost minutes every day and could add up to lost hours over weeks and months."

It is now v3.0.4, and I'm suffering through a similarly painful lag, Biriss--except it is now 30 seconds to a minute per bookmark.

"This is a basic, browsing function and if that main utility of simple browsing is lost when users are forced to upgrade to Firefox 3, I will have to move to another primary browser, even though Firefox 2 is my favorite by far."

I agree, and can only hope that the much-hyped Tracemonkey javascript engine of the next iteration not only speeds up searches, but helps smooth this out, too.

SalmonDay wrote:It is now v3.0.4, and I'm suffering through a similarly painful lag, Biriss--except it is now 30 seconds to a minute per bookmark.

Well, I bit the bullet myself and upgraded to 3.0.4 this week too, with news of the next version of 2.0.0.19 being the last and also losing some security features.

This time I did a completely clean install and again tried all the tweaks and tips I could find to speed things up, but the Firefox 3.0.4 Bookmarking system is still unbearably slow. In Firefox 2, I used the standard "Bookmark this page" with Openbook, but I've switched to using the Sidebar and dragging links from the navigation bar in an effort to retain my sanity. Unfortunately, creating new folders still causes the browser to hang for 20+ seconds. Using the Sidebar also takes a few more inconvenient steps than 2.x with Openbook.

I don't know how the developers are testing this. Maybe the system is designed for people who only have a few dozen bookmarks and just re-Google everything else all the time. If one of the developers had this issue, I'm sure it would be a top priority (and would have been fixed before it was out of beta). The Firefox 3 bookmarking system really doesn't work with any significant amount of bookmarks. It feels like I'm back in the stone ages of web browsing.

I'm not sure that Tracemonkey will do anything for this, since the old engine in Firefox 2 was fast enough for the old flat bookmark file system. I think it has something to do with .sqlite performance, or some other issue caused by one of the new features like duplicate bookmark checking, phishing/malware site screening, tags or some other thing that causes a 20-30 second delay for an operation that should be instant.

I have 900+ bookmarks on bookmarks toolbar in folder and subfolders, and find bookmarking fairly easy in 3.0 using the add bookmark menu itemI use the star as a rapid temp folder, later dragging and dropping those I wish to save to appropriate folders, organizing in the sidebar

note you can open two windows side by side, open sidebars and drag across windows to organize, by using resize bookmarkletscreate new bookmark and enter into location, for leftjavascript:%20resizeTo(screen.availWidth/2,screen.availHeight);window.moveTo(0,0);for rightjavascript:%20resizeTo(screen.availWidth/2,screen.availHeight);window.moveTo((screen.availWidth/2),0);

I put the unsorted folder on toolbar by creating a new bookmark and entering place:folder=UNFILED_BOOKMARKS into location

Well it looks like I will have to leave Firefox 2. I can't use a browser that will no longer have security updates. Google Chrome is very fast with its bookmarks. I recently downloaded it. It is very fast in its bookmarking, and I have tens of thousands of bookmarks. Too bad, though. The Firefox 2 bookmark system seems to have more options.

From reading the more recent comments here it looks like the Firefox 3 problems with sets of thousands of bookmarks has not been solved.

the-edmeister wrote:... Click to highlight and open the folder named Bookmarks Menu ... That should sort the folders by name, followed by the individual bookmarks sorted by name. If you want to do sorting within all the individual folders you will need to repeat those steps for each folder that you want sorted.

Ed,

I'm not having a go at you but at the Firefox developers. Call me a pedant, but I think its important to have your bookmarks sorted, especially when you have as many of them as I do. Given the amount of work that went into Firefox 3 one would think that the developers could get this issue fixed, especially given they are now using a SQL database to store bookmarks.

I use the Java applet Firesort with Firefox 2 and will continue to do so until sorting is fixed in Firefox 3. If Firefox 2 is discontinued and sorting not fixed in Firefox 3 then it will be time to move to Opera.

This is not a technically difficult issue, why can't it be resolved?

Regards,Peter

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. - Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 6